Well, it is an old thing to say that cloud computing has numerous advantages right from being inexpensive, scalable, elastic to being quick. But, one of the least discussed advantages, despite being a very important one, is how it has changed disaster recovery process for big and medium sized enterprise.

Disaster recovery is now obviously more inexpensive, and it helps in lowering the pressure on enterprises to bring in right disaster recovery plans for their entire infrastructure.

This is yet again a strong reason for you to offer cloud hosting solutions to your clients if as a web hosting provider you want to cater to big enterprises or companies that deal with risky and confidential data. With cloud computing on your side, you can now offer much faster recovery to your clients at a much smaller cost compared to what you would have to spend on the regular disaster recovery process.

The Distinguishing Factor

So, what is it that makes cloud different in terms of disaster recovery? We know that cloud is based on the concept of virtualization and its route to disaster recovery is very different. In a virtual environment, all of the server along with applications, operating system, data and patches are encapsulated in just one virtual server or one software bundle. This virtual server can be easily backed up to any offsite data center and can be spun up right on one of the virtual hosts in just few minutes.

As this virtual server is totally independent of any hardware, the applications, operating system, data and patches can be accurately and very safely transferred to any data center from any data center without the need of reloading every server component.

This drastically cuts down the disaster recovery time when compared to the conventional methods in which, the servers are required to be loaded again with applications and operating system and it should be properly patched to the last used configuration that is in production before all the data is restored.

Say Good-Bye to Good-Old Tapes

When you introduce the concept of online connectivity between two different data centers plus the cost-effectiveness of this form of disaster recovery to your clients, it would only astonish them for good. You should know that in such an environment there is no room for tape backups as they can't be justified in terms of recovery speed and cost-effectiveness.

With cloud computing, disaster recovery also becomes very easy and viable, since all the backups can be taken within no time. As there is SAN-to-SAN replication involved in between the sites, disaster recovery for hot site with short recovery duration also become a cost-effective and attractive option. This was something rarely available with conventional disaster recovery methods because of the testing and cost challenges.

Multi-Site Capability

Yet another big advantage of cloud disaster recovery is its ability of delivering multi-site availability. SAN replication provides a very rapid fail-over along with offering the ability to come back to the production site after disaster event or disaster recovery test is done with.

So, isn't it quite evident how disaster recovery with cloud computing can be very advantageous to the enterprises! And, if you haven't really tried out its benefits, it's about time you started testing waters, and made a switch to the cloud-based systems.